Mapping the intellectual structure of digital humanities: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Digital humanities has emerged as a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field at the intersection of humanities, information science, and computational scholarship. The study employs standard bibliometric indicators and visualization techniques to analyse author productivity over time, Lotka's law of scientific productivity, most relevant countries by corresponding author, most cited countries, key word co-occurrence network, thematic mapping of terms and documents in digital humanities to understand its intellectual landscape.Authorship analysis indicates a dominance of single-authored publications, although collaborative research is also becoming increasingly prominent. United States and China emerged as the most productive countries, while citation impact was comparatively stronger in countries such as the United States, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands. Keyword co-occurrence network and thematic analyses show that digital humanities is organized around interconnected themes such as information systems, computational models, networks, algorithms, knowledge, behaviour, impact, and scholarly communication. The study helps in understanding the intellectual and knowledge structure of digital humanities and offers insights for researchers, educators, policymakers, and library and information science professionals for conducting future studies on thematic evolution, interdisciplinary integration, and global research collaboration in the field of digital humanities.